Category Archive

Turkish miniature from the 16th century showing Muhammad and Abu Bakr in the cave. Photograph: Roland & Sabrina Michaud

In a simple house in 7th-century Arabia, a woman drapes an embroidered curtain with pictures of living creatures on it across a doorway. When her husband returns, he is displeased and pulls it down. But the material isn’t wasted: the woman turns it into cushions, which remain in sight without causing further conflict.

This is no ordinary house, and no ordinary husband and wife. It is the prophet of Islam, Muhammad, and his spouse Aisha, who related the story that has been passed down for nearly 1,400 years. And this seemingly trivial domestic incident has had huge ramifications, as part of a body of revelation and tradition on the question of images in one of the world’s great religions. But it also demonstrates an important ambiguity. Muhammad’s objection wasn’t to images per se; in this case it was their prominence, which risked distracting him during prayer. As a covering for cushions, they were fine.

It is an ambiguity that hints at a more complex relationship to the realm of art and representation than is suggested by footage of exploding buddhas in Afghanistan, or riots sparked by cartoons and films showing the prophet. And it is the starting point for Jamal J Elias’s erudite but unsatisfying study of Islam’s attitude to imagery through history.

Anyone who has a more than superficial knowledge of Muslim cultures will be aware of what can seem like a contradictory approach to the issue. There are strong theological precepts against the creation of likenesses of living things, and above all of religious figures, especially Muhammad. And yet lush vegetation in mosaic form garlands the façade of the Umayyad mosque in Damascus, devotional pictures of members of the prophet’s family are common among Shias, and merchants in the Tehran bazaar sell pendants with Muhammad’s portrait on them. Animals prance across carpets, and manuscripts and miniature paintings bustle with human activity. So what’s going on – does Islam prohibit such images or not? How come the bazaaris can carry on plying their trade, while Danish newspapers get picketed?

What’s clear is that the intent behind the creation of an image has a bearing on how it is perceived. It’s less a matter of theology than of reaction to a provocation – a deliberate insult – that brings some Muslims out on to the street. As to prohibition, Elias implies that the west’s search for an easy answer comes down to its broadly Christian viewpoint. At two defining moments in the history of Christianity, arguments about visual art were central. The Byzantine iconoclasm, a period of image-destruction that began in the 8th century, has traditionally been put down to competition with anti-image Islam, growing in strength on the Christian empire’s eastern fringes. Elias points out that this is a story told by later “iconophiles” to discredit their iconophobic forebears by linking them to a barbarian faith. Instead, it’s likely that these ferocious debates were indigenous, as were those that surfaced during the Protestant reformation. Either way, Christianity as a result has a comprehensive theology of imagery, and Christian cultures tend to look on Islam, which lacks one, with perplexity.

What would tell you more about a city? A geographic map that identifies the buildings, roads, rivers and so on? Or one that gauges how people feel about the city by recording their emotional responses as they move around it?

No contest. The second map would say much, much more about what it’s like to be there, which is why the British designer, Christian Nold, has devised a series of Emotion Maps of San Francisco, Paris and other cities. For the San Francisco version, he combined the finger cuff sensors used in police polygraph tests with a global positioning system to monitor the instinctive responses of 98 people as they walked around the Mission District. His guinea pigs then explained why they’d felt happy, sad, angry or whatever in various places, and if their reaction was triggered by something they’d just seen, or memories of past experiences.

Nold’s Emotion Maps are examples of the design process known as visualization, which uses advanced software to illustrate complicated data so that we (that’s the 99.99 percent of us without doctorates in applied mathematics) can understand it. Visualization comes in the form of still images, moving ones and three-dimensional models that depict elusive, often abstract phenomena such as the movement of Internet traffic, scientific theories or a city’s emotional landscape. If you spot an elaborate information graphic in a newspaper or magazine, that may well be an example of visualization too. At a time when we are bombarded with more and more information of increasing complexity, visualization, or “viz” as it’s called for short, is fast becoming one of the most exciting areas of design.

Visualization was a key theme of Design and the Elastic Mind, the landmark exhibition on the relationship of design with science and technology held earlier this year at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. It is also featured in “Data Flow,” a new book published by Gestalten, and the “Native Land, Stop Eject” show now on at Fondation Cartier in Paris. In that exhibition, the philosopher Paul Virilio and the filmmaker Raymond Depardon explore the tragedy of enforced emigration. They collaborated with a team of visualizers led by the U.S. architecture group, Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, to create stunning visual analyses of its causes and impact on different communities

There’s one simple reason why visualization is becoming so important, and that’s our desire to understand what’s happening in the world at a time when it’s becoming harder and harder to do so. “Design always moves where it is needed most,” said Paola Antonelli, curator of Design and the Elastic Mind, who is now working on a major visualization project. “The surge in computing power has generated a surge in information output, and heated up interest in visualization design.”